“As for the story of the big treasure buried by Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds at Davis Mountain, it’s pure bunk. I told Virgil Boucher so when he was through here. But he was a nut over this treasure, and God Almighty couldn’t have made him believe the yarn was not true. All this about the cigar box full of diamonds and the lifesize gold figures of the Virgin and Christ is simply bosh. Zwing Hunt and Billy Grounds never were in Mexico in their lives.
“As outlaws, they didn’t amount to much. I knew Zwing Hunt when he was driving a lumber wagon for Morse’s sawmill. He was a better mule-skinner than he was a bandit. Billy Grounds, whom I knew also, was only nineteen when he was killed. If these two boys had had all the experience as bold freebooters in Mexico they are credited with in this fool story, they would never have acted like scared amateurs when they tried to stick up the stamp mill at Charleston.
“Zwing Hunt was killed by Apaches. There’s no doubt about that. Billy Breakenridge and Phil Montague and several others who had known Hunt well identified the body. So, you can bet everything you’ve got Zwing Hunt never got back to his old home in San Antonio and never told any deathbed story. The way I figure out this buried treasure romance is that Zwing Hunt’s uncle faked it. It sounds like a marijuana pipe dream. There is no Davis Mountain. It is not on any map, and nobody in this country ever heard of a peak by that name. In my opinion, it never had any existence except in the crazy imagination of Zwing Hunt’s uncle.”
But don’t be disheartened by any such talk as this. Don’t let a crabbed old pessimist like Rube Hadden dampen your ardour or shatter your rainbow dreams. Remember that the Cocos Island story, the world’s most gorgeous legend of buried treasure, rests on facts just as nebulous as these, and though the Cocos Island treasure never has been lifted, faith in it has burned like a steady flame for a hundred years. The clear-strain treasure hunter never loses faith or hope.
So, ho, for buried treasure once again! Saddle the ponies and slap the blanket rolls and the grub and the old camp kit on the pack mule. And don’t forget the picks and shovels. Out yonder across the desert a fortune of three million dollars is waiting for you—maybe. All you have to do—perhaps—to make it yours is first to find Davis Mountain.
XVIII
The Honeymoon Cattle Drive
John Slaughter’s pearl-handled six-shooter shines out in opalescent beauty in Tombstone’s history. But it is remembered not so much for its gleaming handle as for its flaming other end. Slaughter’s four years as sheriff of Cochise County, –, was a period of reconstruction and marked the dividing line between lawlessness and law in the Tombstone country. This pearl-handled forty-four was the tool with which Slaughter cemented a permanent fabric of law and order.
John Horton Slaughter was of a family that had been rooted in the soil and traditions of the South since the days of the thirteen colonies. He was born in Louisiana, , according to an entry in the old family Bible, whose dilapidated, dog-eared pages give evidence of a line of churchgoing forbears. With slaves and household chattels, his parents moved to west Texas while he was a baby. The Texas war of independence, San Jacinto, and the Alamo, were still fresh in the memories of Texas people, and the news of the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma at the beginning of the Mexican War of Polk’s administration gave him his first-remembered thrills as a boy. He grew up on the Texas steppes when buffalo were still plentiful and settlers had to fight for their lives against Kiowas and Comanches. He enlisted as a soldier under the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy at the outbreak of the Civil War, but after brief service was invalided home. Though little fighting against Yankees fell to his experience, he saw hard fighting against Indians and outlaws as a Texas Ranger under the noted Captain Tom. In early manhood, he embarked in the cattle business on his own, married Miss Adeline Harris, and established his ranch in Atacosa County in the Panhandle.
Slaughter shared in the prosperity that came to the Texas cattle industry when the first Western railroads opened to the prairies the rich markets of the East, and the price of steers went at a bound from one dollar to twenty dollars a head. He not only raised cattle but bought them all over west Texas, and he drove his herds to market at Dodge City and the towns and army posts west of the Pecos. In those boom times of the trails, he acted as his own herd boss and took part in all the dangers and hardships of the long drives—fighting Indians, trail-cutters, and desperadoes and becoming proficient, in a day of the strong arm, in protecting his own and holding what was his against every form of rapacity and lawless violence.
While Slaughter was buying cattle in the Devil’s River region of southwestern Texas, Bill Gallagher, bad man and notorious trail-cutter, laid claim to several hundred of Slaughter’s steers. Gallagher
